Travel Tip: Always read your reservation

This is one of the few travel tips that I didn’t learn the hard way…at least not this time.

To get from Seattle to Victoria I’m flying on Kenmore Air’s Seaplanes. Originally I thought this was a milk run, but it turns out it just included shuttle service from SEA to Kenmore’s Seaplane terminal, then on to YHW.

As I discovered that I also discovered another little nugget: there is a 25 pound luggage allowance. Since this didn’t say 24 pounds per bag, but rather 24 pounds total (with no indication of what an overage entailed) I had to do some rearranging. I got a luggage scale at TBEX ’10 so I put my laptop bag on it. 15 pounds! Then I weighed my rollerboard: 20 pounds! I need my laptop and I’d prefer not to purchase clothes at the last minute so I switched from a roller to my old athletic duffel bag and I took out all non-essentials such as the old android chargers I’d been carrying, car chargers since I wasn’t going to have a car, I’m going blazerless, and I also carefully counted undergarments.

When I checked in I had 22 pounds so everything is coming with me. Other customers were way over so their bags are going “stand-by” whatever that means.

I had flown on a 15-ish passenger Cessna down in Costa Rica so I figured since the seaplane is smaller they would need my weight for weight and balance if luggage is limited to 24 pounds total. I’m sure others might think it is an odd question, but the others checking in all responded politely. The passenger with 40 pounds of luggage, however, was not as polite about being separated from her luggage. If I had known 100% that I could bring extra baggage for a fee I would have. One lady was 8 pounds over and it was like $11 extra.